Re: Relative Namespaces

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Martin Gudgin wrote:

> > Also to clarify-- is Tim saying that the following is pointless because it
> > equates to a prefixed name being treated as a non namespace name or is he
> > saying that the document is in error wrt to namespaces because the prefix
> > can not logically be resolved?
> >
> >   <foo:bar xmlns:foo="http://foo.com">
> >     <foo:baz xmlns:foo=""/>
> >   </foo:bar>
>
> The document is in error and most ( but not all :-) ) XML parsers would
> throw an error of some kind.

Not in my experience, but then those parsers might be incorrect... I see
two statements that could be seen as conflicting:

In the XML spec:

  The Namespaces in XML Recommendation [XML Names] assigns a meaning to
  names containing colon characters. Therefore, authors should not use the
  colon in XML names except for namespace purposes, but XML processors
  must accept the colon as a name character.

So assuming there is no foo prefix in scope in the above, the processor
must accept the colon anyway?

But then in the namespaces spec:

  The Prefix provides the namespace prefix part of the qualified name, and
  must be associated with a namespace URI reference in a namespace
  declaration.

Two possibly conflicting uses of "must" ?

Expat and Gnome's libxml both accept the above document, FWIW.

-- 
<Matt/>

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